Bedrock delineates a geological
feature; inherently variable, its makeup is determined by seismic
shift resulting in a composite of material that in turn provides the
foundations for the landscape as we see it on the surface. Above the
Bedrock lies a layer of unconsolidated rock or substratum followed by
subsoil, the surface horizon and an organic horizon layer. In
Stratigraphy, these stratum are labelled R, C, B, A and O. The notion
of time in geological terms is one entirely alien to our own, with
transformations transpiring over millions of years. As such, this
subterranean and largely invisible landscape remains unfamiliar,
removed from our own temporal mortality while simultaneously shaping
those landscapes on which our human experience, our very notions of
the earth and natural world are formulated. Bedrock is universal, it
does not designate geographic or social boundaries, but provides the
foundations for a landscape within which we operate, dissecting it
both physically and politically over time. In comparison to the
turbulent world of borders and political relations on the surface,
Bedrock is constant.

This exhibition takes this notion of
Bedrock as its own foundation and conceptual framework, an
exploration of our connection to the earth through science, popular
culture and spiritual mysticism. The purpose of this essay therefore,
is to provide a contextual underpinning, to establish the historical
and social milieu from which these practices have emerged. Through
doing so, we aim to interrogate and throw light on our collective yet
diverse perspectives on landscape, the earth and our place within it
as both product and inhabitant of its surface. Most importantly
perhaps, we seek to provide a platform from which art is able to
cement itself as a discursive force or intervention capable of
reinforcing or subverting these viewpoints on our worldly
surroundings.

Our relationship with the earth has
forever been integral to our very existence. The earth’s function
however, while always maintaining a status of provider, has altered
irrevocably over the course of our evolution. For the hunter-gather
archetype, the earth represented food and shelter, it provided
entirely for his sustenance and survival. While ‘living off the
land’ for early man meant relying on it for his immediate
existence, in the modern age this sustenance requires money and
commerce. In today’s society, the earth’s greatest material
assets are no longer seen as those cherished by early man, but those
of its very makeup; its natural resources. We might argue that this
has been the case ever since man harnessed raw materials; with the
invention of tools comes skills, which in turn leads to an exchange
in services for goods. With trade in place, the way is paved for the
arrival of money and the development of industry and organised
labour. While this development has taken place over millions of
years, it is no revelation that we have long inhabited an age where
the earth itself has become commodity.

While the harvesting of ores, minerals
and fossil fuels is a source of colossal capital for those relative
industries, it would be short sighted to state that this perception
of the earth as commercial asset is applicable to all. There are of
course many cultures that hold entirely dissimilar attitudes towards
the natural world and their surrounding landscape, a view perhaps
more in tune with the earth as entity, one worthy of respect or even
worship. We refer here, to the many indigenous cultures that see the
earth both as their material and spiritual provider, elevating nature
to the position of creator or spiritual power. Yet even this
spiritual connection to the natural world is not immune to what we
might call a corruption via commoditisation and popular culture.
During the European colonial period it is unarguable that the
treatment towards native peoples was one of violence and oppression
through the forcible acquisition of land and labour. This attitude
towards indigenous populations can be interpreted as depicting
European societies fear towards the Other. Emmanuel Levinas declared
that there are three distinct responses when confronted with the
Other; the first being one of violence, to kill in an attempt to
exterminate the harbinger of difference. This ultimately fails, as
the concept of alterity itself survives beyond its physical
embodiment1. If during this period we witness the first
stage of response to the Other, then we could argue that today we are
witnessing the third stage; to defuse the Other through integrating
it into our own totality – remaking it as part of ourselves2.
This development can perhaps best be observed through the rise in new
age spiritualism, the market for native arts and crafts and the
appropriation of native signs and customs. This appropriation of
culture depicts the capital value of the exotic and its marketability
to economically dominant societies; it depicts our desire to connect
with that which is foreign. As Deborah Root explains in her book,
Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of
difference, there is a more sinister undercurrent to this
practise of cultural appropriation; such acts imply a right to that
which is appropriated, and an assumption of prior ownership or
entitlement on behalf of the appropriator. As Root states,
‘Appropriation reduces the living people and culture to the status
of objects.’3 In short, while on the surface the
marketing of native crafts and spirituality may appear to illustrate
progressions in multicultural attitudes, an appropriation of a
cultural sign carried out without the consultation of its owners
serves to reinforce what Root calls a ‘colonial space.’4

We have mentioned briefly the effects
of appropriation on spiritual beliefs, many of which hold a
connection to the earth as a spiritual body, but what occurs when
landscape itself becomes the subject of appropriation? As Simon
Schama states in his text Landscape and Memory, ‘ Before it
can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is a work of the mind.
Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers
of rock.’5 Here Schama argues that our notion of
landscape, or rather a particular landscape is denoted as much by our
personal memories towards it as its geographical or geological
features. As a case in point, the landscape of Arizona is perhaps one
of the most easily recognizable within Western culture. A Wikipedia
entry entitled List of Films Shot in Arizona perhaps goes some
way in providing explanations for this phenomenon, namely, that the
Arizonan vista is the location for countless mainstream films that
have permeated our collective perception of the place. From a
plethora of Westerns to Easy Rider, Arizona has provided the
backdrop to numerous narratives of adventure, violence and freedom
under expansive blue skies. As such, our view of Arizona has been so
irreversibly moulded by cinema and popular culture that it is hard to
conceive of it as a place in its own right; the fact that Arizona is
home to numerous indigenous peoples such as the Navajo and the Hopi
often remains forgotten outside of their generally incorrect
representations within Hollywood cinema.

This example serves to illustrate a
broader point; in our digital age, our notions of the earth, of
landscape and of place are becoming deterritorialized. Through Google
maps we can observe the geographic topology of almost anywhere in the
world and through street view we can even visit it at ground level.
This inherent globalising effect of the digital gives way to an
entirely new way of seeing our planet; No longer reliant on books or
television reports, we can visit the furthest corners of the earth
via a few clicks of a mouse. In a sense, such technology has further
demystified what was once unknown.

Figure
1: Arizona Desert Sunset Mountains Wallpaper HD

While Google Maps may make the surface
of our globe familiar, there is technology that probes further,
providing insight into the most inaccessible areas of the earth; it’s
interior. 3D seismic mapping provides us with a graphic display of
the earth’s geological makeup and provides a suitable example from
which to examine the influence of science and the digital over our
image of the natural world. The language of 3D mapping is both one of
geophysics and commerce. Through these technologies, the earth is
effectively laid bare as data. As such, we witness the mediation of
the natural via the digital. Effectively translating one language to
another, we are presented with a pictorial representation of nature
which is entirely abstracted, its form rendered unrecognizable. This
gridding or cartographic practice is one that demarcates earth as
commodity, a language of industry and carbon based energy interests
such as oil drilling or Fracking. In effect, through scientific
illustrations of the earth’s crust, we witness a double Othering of
what we considered the familiar. Primarily, we are confronted with
the earth beneath the surface, and secondly, we witness it as
deterritorialized into an entirely foreign space – floating digital
matter navigated via the cursor, we are able to zoom in and out and
view from all angles – the digital removes all sense of perspective
and scale. While we have mentioned the skewing
of spatial perception, there is another layer of distortion that we
are subjected to through this process, the distortion of time. When
examining seismic maps, we effectively view an abstract timeline upon
a vertical axis – each layer represents a stratum of rock that in
turn denotes its geological age. When viewing such timelines in real
life cross-sections of earth, this progression of time is visible.
However the abstraction witnessed through seismic mapping serves to
completely remove our awareness of physical forms, and with them, our
signifiers for time. Of course, those accustomed to such technology
have learnt its signs, yet there remains a definite removal. The time
of the digital is constantly within the present; its form is
software, files and code, matter that appears to hold no physical
presence whatsoever, the space of the digital is diametric to the
physical world, a space within which time itself is warped. In short,
when viewing the earth through such technologies, we do so through a
lens of removal, one that alienates us from every facet inherent to
its natural subject.

Figure
2: Leapfrog 3d modelling software

We might propose
then, that in our synthetic society we exist at odds with the earth
itself; that we exist in an age of opposition to the natural world.
This however is not the case, for the synthetic and the natural are
of course one and the same. In his 1968 essay A
Sedimentation of the Mind, Robert
Smithson explains, ‘Even the most advance tools and machines are
made of the raw matter of the earth. Today’s highly refined
technological tools are not much different in this respect from those
of the caveman.’6
From this then, we return to the concept of earth as provider, no
matter to what extent society appears to separate itself from the
natural world, the earth remains integral to this process. Michael
Heizer sums up this theory in an interview in 1984 stating,
‘synthetics are intensifications of the organic sources.’7
Within the same text, Smithson compares geological systems to those
systems of the mind, the continual erosion of thought and concept,
giving way to new ideas and cognitive processes8.
This is an apt analogy, and the mention of Smithson and Heizer an
important one, for having navigated a number of ways in which society
and culture relate to the natural world, we will now ask how art
might seek to reflect and interrogate such relationships.

In their landmark text A Thousand
Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari adopted a geological
metaphor to illustrate all worldly systems, proposing that all things
are an amalgamation of heterogeneous elements which when fused adopt
the characteristics both of their individual components and of a new
whole, a process they named a double articulation9. This
is a concept quite succinctly demonstrated through Geology as
demonstrated by Manuel De Landa in his interpretation of the text;

‘...each one of the two articulations involves substances and
forms: sedimentation is not just about accumulating pebbles
(substance) but also about sorting them into uniform layers (form);
while consolidation not only effects new architectonic couplings
between pebbles (form) but also yields a new entity, a sedimentary
rock (substance). Moreover, these new entities may themselves
accumulate and sort (as in the alternating layers of schist and
sandstone that make up Alpine mountains) and become consolidated when
tectonic forces cause the accumulated layers of rock to fold and
become a higher scale entity, a mountain’10

The same of course can be said of Art.
Any work of art encompasses concepts from those which have preceded
it, but as a product of its environment, art will naturally
amalgamate any number of diverse and often contradictory elements
within its totality. Art therefore becomes a product not only of its
own context, but the context of all artworks and of all systems they
operate within. Ultimately, this forms an interconnected system with
no beginning and no end termed by Deleuze and Guattari as a
Rhizome11. Adopting this theoretical model, artworks are
able to resist compartmentalisation, connecting with each other as
with the rest of the world, regardless of past present or future.
When discussing the movements of art history, it is this we should
bear in mind; rather than visualizing a timeline from which works in
the present day find their root; we should instead envisage an open
discourse between work both in the present day, the past and indeed
the future. Only in this way can we allow for an open plane upon
which trains of artistic thought can be discussed, developed and
disseminated, yet also adapted and reinterpreted.

One such train of thought can be
observed in 1915, within the painting of Mondrian on the advent of
his discovery of a new and ideal form of representation. Composition
10 in Black and White (1915) marks Mondrian’s departure from
Cubism into his own unique form of perfect abstraction. While not yet
fully realised, the image marks the conception of Mondrian’s
signature style; one which sought to revise a world view on landscape
and the natural world. Indeed Mondrian’s departure from figurative
representation is not surprising when we consider his interest in
philosophy. His desire to depict the world as it really was, the
truth beyond the visual, reveals that this progression into abstract
modes of representation was integral to his world view. In turn,
Kenneth Clark in his text Landscape into Art provides an
additional contextual reasoning for a departure from figurative
landscape painting, he writes, ‘The microscope and telescope have
so greatly enlarged the range of our visions, that the snug, sensible
nature which we can see with our own eyes has ceased to satisfy our
imaginations.’12 Here again, in a text from 1949, we see
the mediatory lens of technology filtering our view of the earth. For
Mondrian and his contemporaries of the De Stijl movement, such
abstraction presented a deconstructive engine through which to
explore and promote a utopian vision of perfect order and
spirituality. This notion of spirituality, and in particular, the
spiritual essence of landscape was of particular relevance to
Mondrian, who throughout his career had attempted to express this
mysticism within nature. Through the employment of geometry and
primary colour, Mondrian endeavoured to purify the natural, reducing
it to base elements that were no longer pictorially specific in form
to precise locations but presented a universal depiction of the world
beyond, of emotion and spirituality in the face of beauty. As
Mondrian himself wrote;

‘Therefore art can express style precisely, whereas in nature
style remains for the most part veiled. To express
style precisely, art must free itself from the natural
appearance of things so as not to represent them: only in an abstract
appearance can it represent the tension of form, the intensity
of color and the harmony revealed by nature. ‘13

The formal geometry of Mondrian’s
painting can also be seen to reference other lines imposed upon
landscape, those of cartography, used to demarcate land towards
geographic, political and economic means. In some ways then,
Mondrian’s use of the grid structure can be seen as a subversion of
its typical usage within the map.

While we may often associate geometry
with mathematics and science, it is prevalent within the natural
world, Heizer elaborates on this stating, ‘Geometry is organic. The
study of crystallography demonstrates that there is more geometry in
nature than man could ever develop...there is no sense of order that
doesn’t exist in nature.’14 Again we return to Heizer,
and with good reason. While Mondrian’s concern lay within painting
which he deemed the most flexible means of aesthetic expression,
another more recent movement concerned with landscape sought to
transgress entirely from two dimensional, pictorial form; favouring
instead to work upon the earth itself. In the mid to late 1960’s,
the Land Art movement subverted previous incarnations of the
landscape in art by introducing the concept of landscape as
art. This shift from subject to object, often realized on a vast
scale, threw into jeopardy existing ideas on sculpture, art as
commodity and our relationship with the natural world, in particular,
our intervention or imposition upon it.

The term Land Art often recalls the
earthworks of Smithson and Heizer such as the iconic Spiral Jetty
(1970) and the immense 244,000 tonne displacement Double negative
(1969-70)both of which still exist today. However, viewing Land
Art as a movement concerned solely with mans influence over the
landscape would fall significantly short of the movements intentions.
Firstly we should consider the types of spaces favoured by early Land
Art practitioners for their work. Often, the desert was the landscape
of choice; however, dry lakes, mudflats and all manner of similar
sites were also employed. It is neutrality that these locations have
in common, Land Art was not concerned with landscapes of picturesque
beauty, but with periphery spaces. The emptiness of the desert, often
depicted within cinema evokes a sense of endless possibility, a tough
landscape where man must come to terms with himself as much as his
environment. In certain cases, post-industrial landscapes were
preferred, those that Smithson describes as being ‘disrupted or
pulverized’ in a process of ‘denaturalization’14. In
all cases, the landscape of Land Art stood in stark contrast to those
typically evoked within the art that had gone before.

As much as early earthworks were
interested in intervening with landscape, they were equally concerned
with the temporal nature of such work and the disparity between their
own time and that of the environment they operated within. This
concern is perhaps best demonstrated through works such as Walter De
Maria’s Desert Cross (1969) or even Richard Long’s A
Line Made by Walking (1967), the life spans of which ranged from
months to minutes in the case of the latter. Other works were also
subject to erosion and decay, Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown
(1969) and Glue Pour (1970) would both have a temporary
physical presence. In the case of these works however, we can note
another vein of investigation within the movement, that of the
displacement or introduction of materials. While works like Spiral
Jetty constituted the moving of matter to a new location, Asphalt
Rundown and Glue Pour see the introduction of the
synthetic within the natural landscape, bringing the two into direct
confrontation to create new forms.

Of course, while Land Art is commonly
considered a form of sculptural practice, the remote nature of many
works means this view has in part been shaped by our experience of
them through photographs. It is only in visiting the work, when we
cannot comprehend it as a totality, but instead must walk around and
in it, that we realise that many pieces were actively engaged with
the viewer’s navigation of landscape and spatial surroundings. As
such, Land Art was as much concerned with the surrounding
environment, as the work itself, often engaging with historical,
mythological and social issues inherent to its site. One such work
which perhaps sums up all of these concerns within early Land Art, is
Dennis Oppenheim’s Relocated Burial Ground (1978) in which
Oppenheim drew a large cross in industrial primer upon the landscape.
While this form of mark making appears to reference mapping and
demarcation of land, it also holds religious connotations. The
eventual erasure of the synthetic primer serves to highlight the
gradual erosion of manmade spiritual sites within collective memory
and the tangible landscape.

From this brief exploration of previous
art practices, we can discern that many of the concerns expressed
within such movements maintain their relevance today. Our
relationship with the earth is both ever evolving and paradoxical.
While the earth itself denotes our very existence, society
continually seeks to improve upon it. Whether through genetically
modified crops, plastic surgery or the Palm islands in Dubai,
mainstream societies existence appears to be at once dependant on the
earth, and in contention with it. The interventions of Land Art and
the painting of Mondrian both sought to engage with the earth on
levels relevant to the time of their creation, and the art of today
is no different. Whereas Land Art focussed on denaturalized or
peripheral landscapes, artists in today’s climate may explore any
terrain as denaturalized through satellites and ubiquitous screens.
There are grounds to, for exploration of the spiritual investment in
landscape, still prevalent today as a counter attitude towards earth
as commodity. In what ways though, can artists hope to engage
critically with an earth we believe ourselves to be so familiar with?
How can art escape our preconceived notions of place, formed through
popular culture and digital media? One such way would be for artists
to create their own landscapes. Through creating new vistas,
unfamiliar to society’s gaze, we may hope to provide critical
distance, to rid ourselves of a globalised notion of place, shedding
light on issues in our own material world.

In comparison to the changes witnessed
within humanities past, the earth itself has altered very little, the
stratum of bedrock appears static to the stratum of human history.
One thing however remains certain, that no matter the shifts within
society, our dependency on the earth is unquestionable; the earth
itself provides the Bedrock for human existence.